The last time the world was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of Coolio, he was duetting with a bunch of college students on a cover of “Gangsta’s Paradise.” Since then, he’s been a bit like the Loch Ness monster, or the novelist Thomas Pynchon: rarely seen yet often discussed, particularly in discussions among drunk millennials about the 1990s.
Now, Coolio is back and better than ever, releasing brand new material via a rather surprising source (or not surprising at all, depending on how you look at it): the streaming porn site Pornhub, which will host an exclusive premiere of his new tracks.
According to TMZ, the “Gangsta’s Paradise”/Kenan and Kel rapper—who is 50 years old, apparently—partnered up with the tube site giant for the video for his first single, “Take It to the Hub.” In exchange for providing the background dancers for the video, including adult performers Skin Diamond, Missy Martinez, and Jessica Bangkok, Coolio agreed to grant the tube site with exclusive rights to his new record.
You can check out a one-minute preview of the video for “Take It to the Hub,” which features porn stars writhing against a car as Coolio douses them with water from a hose. (There’s also a lady twerking with what looks like Yoshi from Mario Kart, because of course she is). It’s censored, so it’s SFW, though not exactly SFF (safe for feminists).
Coolio’s partnership with Pornhub is obviously a huge boon for the artist, who hasn’t released a new album since 2009’s From the Bottom 2 the Top: He’s been out of the limelight for so long that he’ll probably hugely benefit from a relationship with Pornhub, which reportedly gets about 32.6 million unique visitors a day.
But it’s probably an even bigger win for Pornhub itself. The website, which is notorious for its shrewd self-promotional efforts, has made a point of seeking mainstream cultural exposure since trying (and failing) to get CBS to run a commercial for their website during the Super Bowl last year. Earlier this year, they also launched a campaign to hire an SFW marketing director to bring the Pornhub brand into the mainstream advertising world.
Of course, the SFW marketing campaign was likely little more than a PR grab, and a shrewd one at that, as is the partnership with Coolio. It’s also unlikely that, given the inherently NSFW nature of their product, Pornhub will ever fully cross over into the SFW marketing space. But now that it’s partnered up with Coolio, a de facto millennial folk hero, Pornhub might be slowly inching toward that goal.
H/T TMZ | Screengrab via Kanaal van UitzendingTVGemist/YouTube
